Can you be fired for a bad advertising campaign? This is what just happened to Sasha Suda, executive director of the Philadelphia Art Museum (PhAM). This affair reveals the tensions between the director and her board of directors (CA) since her arrival in 2022. Several aspects of her policy seem to have pushed the CA to make this decision. It would seem that the primary reason relates to largely insufficient fundraising, the director having failed to put in place more solid patronage. The new graphic identity of the museum that she launched before the council’s agreement would have been the last straw.
Sasha Suda is also the victim of ideological tensions: her disagreements on the guideline with the council regarding inclusion are reported by certain media. So The Philadelphia Citizen announced in August that some members were not in agreement with Sasha Suda: “because it focused – too much, in their view – on inclusion, for what they saw as too narrow a focus on exhibitions, and for a slow start to fundraising”.
Of Czechoslovak origin and having grown up in Canada, after studying art history at Princeton University then a master’s degree at Williams College, Sasha Suda obtained a doctorate at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University on the cult of saints in Bohemia in the Middle Ages. She began her career in 2003 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York as an art historian in the department of medieval art. In 2011, Suda returned to Canada to join the Toronto Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) as a curator. In 2019, she took over as director of the National Gallery of Canada, where she distinguished herself by opening a department devoted to Indigenous people and decolonization. She takes charge of PhAM in 2022.
But barely had she set foot in the museum when a strike by recently unionized employees began. It lasted 19 days, after which the demonstrators were successful in certain demands.
The change of identity of the museum in October 2025 is widely criticized by the press. Comparisons of the new logo to that of a football team, a beer brand or a teenage clothing brand suggest that the aim is to attract a younger audience. The change of name from the Philadelphia Museum of Art to the Philadelphia Art Museum, however, only confirmed common usage.
His biggest project at the head of the institution remains the creation of a wing specializing in contemporary African art. The Brind Center for African and African Diaspora Art, inaugurated in 2023 and financed by trustee Ira Brind, is part of a broader policy of equity and highlighting minorities. The director had also put together a major exhibition on contemporary African-American artists, “The Time is Always Now”.
